Brian Sweany’s new book, first book, Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer, will be out on april 25! Read this fantastic bpost from Brian about what it’s like to be a first time author.
April 22nd – sherrygomes.com
Author Highlight/ Guest Post
Guest Post – How hard was it to break into publishing, and how does it feel to be a first time author?
The short answer is that breaking into publishing was for me akin to childbirth in its sheer level of abject demoralizing pain juxtaposed by ultimate redemption. But I have some time, so I’ll give you the long answer too.
I only started writing at the tail-end of college when I discovered I had a knack for sappy, romantic poetry. One of my English teachers, a Catholic nun by the name of Sister Stella, read one of my, uh, “saucier” poems in a class note she confiscated from a girl. Rather than scold me, she took me aside and said there was a real writer in me trying to get out. She said that I should think about writing prose instead of poetry. I enrolled in Sister Stella’s class a business major, and by the end of the semester was an English major, so Sister basically changed my life.
Right out of college in the mid 90s, I penned a 110,000-word sci-fi novel called THE MESSIAH PROJECT that upwards of a hundred agents and publishers rightfully told me was a pile of crap. I shelved the book and my dreams of being a writer, taking a job as an editor for a publisher of computer manuals and cookbooks.
That’s when life happened. I got married, had kids, and I got a “real” job as the Director of Acquisitions for audiobook publisher Recorded Books. The job took me to New York once a month to negotiate book deals with publishers and agents, and being so relentlessly exposed to great writing, I couldn’t help but get the itch again. I started going back to the writing that meant the most to me, and that was my own personal journals I had written during some tough times in my early 20s. I wanted to mine that passion and fearlessness and see where it took me. Ultimately, it took me to around the year 2006 and an agent who wanted to represent me, and after that about a year of working with my agent to tweak my manuscript. Five years and 55 rejections later—not to mention 17 years after I wrote my first novel about cloning Jesus—I signed my first book deal. Just as a postscript, my publisher signed me up for a sequel earlier this past fall, so I basically went from 17 years and roughly 150 rejections to four months and zero rejections. At this rate, I might need to travel back in time to sign my third book.
As for how it feels to be a first time author, I’m conflicted. There was the honeymoon phase, that brief period of euphoria right after I signed the deal in which people came out of the woodwork to congratulate me and I felt this overwhelming sense of accomplishment and affirmation. But then there was the editing, followed by the marketing, and now I often wake up and think, “What the hell did I get myself into?”
Not that I mind it really. My experience with my editor was intense but fantastic, and the story that emerged from our back-and-forth was immeasurably improved from the first draft to the last. But from a marketing standpoint, publishing in the age of social media, especially as a first time author, is just a very hands-on experience. Between your computer, your smartphone , your e-reader and your tablet, you’re almost never unplugged. I sometimes find myself more than a little envious of the Hemingway archetype—you know, that writer on an island honing his craft or getting drunk every day while people just leave him the f*** alone. But then somebody likes one of my posts on Facebook or retweets me, and I’m all, “Man, I am totally awesome!”